Why write?
On thoughtcrime, power laws, community and bat signals.
Why not to write
There are many reasons one shouldn’t write. Simply put, “Writing is always such a dangerous thing”, said Peter Thiel after something he wrote about (read here) went viral, and is being used against him till date.1
“Writing a book was more dangerous than having a child because you could always disown a child if it turned out badly”.
Thoughtcrime is already quite dangerous, but even more so with the Overton window shrinking, what is thoughtcrime changes faster than you can keep up with.
When you write it you give it this quasi permanent state, making it an easy attack vector against you in case you attract too much attention from those who don’t like what you’re saying. What makes it worse, is that Twitter defaults as the left of barbell “writing” platform for most people reading this.
Twitter requires you to compress all ideas into soundbite versions of themselves — real ideas have caveats, holes and missing pieces, exceptions, even doubts by the writer themselves; all of which is impossible to fit into 280 characters.
Twitter is probably better than no writing at all, but now’s hopefully a good time to change that for myself, before I start thinking in tweets.
The power law of essays and ideas
Most of the time I have spent reading essays has been concentrated in the works of the top 10% I like the most, while discarding the other 90% as useless internet-space-occupying pages. But that 10% makes it worth it; I keep coming back to them again and again, they inform my worldview to a worrying extent, and are now classified as life-starter-pack reading for me.
Hard to say if intentionally or naturally, I’ve ended up with a lot heuristics and aphorisms regarding how to navigate life and other things. Friends (in jest and otherwise) refer to it as my fundas or gyaan. For those of you not from North India, “funda” is another Indianism, referring to FUNDAmental principles of something, and “gyaan” translates literally to knowledge, but used pejoratively to refer to unsolicited advice. I don’t really mind that, because just like the power law of blogs, there is a power law of these ideas, where most will discard them, politely if friends or scoffingly if not. Few, maybe 10% or even lesser, will be asymmetrically interested.
They ask questions, engage with, and even fork your ideas. If there are a handful of people whose worldview I am able to change positively and form deeper bonds with (i.e. become closer friends with, hire, fund, etc.), this whole thing is a fruitful exercise. For me, finding and connecting with these people beyond my primary network is probably the most important reason to put up what I write.
Things I’ll write about
I’ll write about things I’m interested in, obviously. If the past is any indication, it will range from history, charter cities, food, policy, “Culture”, religion, crypto, etc. These topics might be random, but the common frame through which I like to examine all of these is future-only orientation.
Generally speaking my aim is explore where things are headed, where it should be headed, and how to make possibly make exponential improvements to get there. What does the future of the world, and more importantly to me, India, look like? And how do we get there?
There are too many writing about things that were for the sake of it (“history”), things that are (“news”), and why things are wrong (“op-eds”). I don’t believe these are wrong in themselves, but lack definite optimism, which focuses on the future and more specific ideas on how to make that a reality.
A futurist orientation can come in many versions:
The humanities version: Where the norm here is to complain about “x inequality being unfair” , a futurist orientation thinks about how to make the x irrelevant in itself or make the debate redundant by abundance;
The legal version: Instead of excessive debate on if something is constitutional or not, the futurist orientation tries to figure out if something should be constitutional or not, for example. And I can go on…
If you think this is how you think as well, hang around; and welcome to Indofuturism.
Bonus: Some crypto experimentation
Pseudonymous subscriptions: We recently invested in Wordcel, a decentralising publishing stack on Solana built over their proprietary social protocol. If you’d want to subscribe pseudonymously, you can do so too. Every future post here will also include a link to the uncensorable, unedited, first version on backed up on Wordcel. (Coming soon!)
Tokens: One of the big reasons I work in crypto is that I think tokens are 10x improvement in creating economic alignment within communities. With more and more wagmibhais exiting crypto, feels like it’s the right time to experiment with that as well. This blog will be at the centre of any experimentation I could do with $NEIL via Coinvise. Learn more here.
Said by Peter Thiel in Conversations with Tyler regarding the essay available at https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/.